Frankly, articles like these are a deterrent to all but the most techie of people. Why go through all this and shell $270 when you can get an Amazon EC2 instance free for a year!
I do wish the article gave more attention to VPS providers like AWS or Rackspace, but I don't see how anything in the article could discourage someone from administering their own server (that is, of the set of people who aren't already put off by scary command lines). 90% of the article is relevant to someone with a VPS.
FWIW, my current costs for a single dev server at Rackspace (initially Slicehost) are about $12-$20/month ($240 max for a year), which probably costs less than the electricity my current computer is using.
Even were I to want one on a webserver on the localhost I'd probably just install webmin or something, which you can do equally well on a VM somewhere else.
That said, I wouldn't use a GUI for such things, but I would still prefer my own box. The big power button is a lot easier than EC2s endless menus and options. I say this from the perspective of someone who's used EC2 for a couple of project - imagine someone who's never seen it before.